I wrote this, with a friend of mine, a year or two ago. Feel free to share it, if youre so inclined. True story: How Miss Piggy Became a Bear by Roberta E. Dzubow and Alexis Worlock In some parts of the world, when the truth doesnt suit ones political aims, the truth very simply gets discarded. A little-known victim of this phenomenon is The Muppets (childrens program) character, Miss Piggy. When The Muppets was to be broadcast in Arabic on Egyptian television, Miss Piggy presented the producers there with two problems. First: as the Arabic language does not have a P sound, her name had to be altered. So Piggy became Biggy. Then there was the problem of her species. Egypt is a Muslim country, and the religion of Islam harbors an intractable loathing for all things pig--even cute little pink puppets. Saudi Arabia solved this problem by banning poor Miss Piggy altogether. The Egyptians, however, came up with something more inventive: they declared that “Biggy” was... a bear. So rather than having to call her al-Hanzira Biggy (Biggy the Sow), they named her al-Dibba Biggy -- Biggy-the-She-Bear. In Egypt, a country with over 80 million people (but virtually no pigs), thousands of children may well believe the pink, snout-nosed muppet is an image of a bear. This creative license with identity, in the Arab world, isnt limited to puppet characters of inconvenient species. The same semantic sleight-of-hand has also been done, to more serious effect, in creating a new identity for a nationality that has always (up until very recently) simply been called Arab. The designation Palestinian creates the same initial problem for speakers of Arabic that Miss Piggy does: as there is no P sound in Arabic, Arabs would never have named themselves “Palestinians”. This name has, in fact, referred to the Jews--from all the way back to the time the Romans quashed Jewish independence in 63 CE and renamed the area in order to obscure its Jewish origins. The Romans never succeeded, however, in breaking the connection between the Jews and their ancestral land. There are many examples throughout history of the name “Palestinian” referring to the Jewish inhabitants of the disenfranchised Jewish State of Israel/Judea. Jewish soldiers who fought alongside the British during World War II were called “The Palestine Brigade”. The “Palestine Post (now The Jerusalem Post), the Palestine Electric Company (now the Israel Electric Company) the Palestine Philharmonic, composed of Jewish refugees from Europe (now the Israel Philharmonic), the Bank of Palestine (now Bank Hapoelim) are all evidence of the Jewish identification with their historical name. In 1967, however, Yasser Arafat--(having learned a thing or two at the worlds premier training ground for propaganda, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow) -- co-opted the name Palestinian in order to claim the title for Arabs, regardless of whether they came from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan... or even, like Arafat himself, Egypt. So thats how a pink puppet pig became a bear; and Arabs with designs on the land of Israel became the Palestinians.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 07:51:22 +0000
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